Cosmetic surgery and the $SL(2,\mathbb{C})$ Casson invariant for two-bridge knots

Abstract

We consider the cosmetic surgery problem for two-bridge knots in the 3-sphere. It is seen that all the two-bridge knots at most 9 crossings other than $9_{27} = S(49,19)=C[2,2,-2,2,2,-2]$ admits no purely cosmetic surgery pairs. Then we show that any two-bridge knot of the Conway form $[2x,2,-2x,2x,2,-2x]$ with $x \ge 1$ admits no cosmetic surgery pairs yielding homology 3-spheres, where $9_{27}$ appears for $x=1$. Our advantage to prove this is using the $SL(2,\mathbb{C})$ Casson invariant.